Eurovision song contest dataset

I’m teaching hierarchical clustering in my course on DataCamp, and I needed an interesting dataset. Importantly, I wanted the dataset to have labelled instances, so that the dendrogram would be easily interpretable, but also not too many instances, so they all fit on the dendrogram. Fortunately for me, the Eurovision song contest has been publishing the voting results (which is great!) and these are perfect. Both the voting results from the judges, and those from the public give great results. The only thing you need to adjust for is that countries are not allowed to vote for themselves in Eurovision, and this gives you some missing values in the data. I filled these with the maximum score of 12, since it is reasonable to assume that countries would vote selfishly if they were allowed to. Below is the dendrogram of a hierarchical (agglomerative) clustering using complete linkage.

A better version

It occurs to me now that I should have normalised the rows after filling in the missing values. This does indeed improve the hierarchical clustering further.